We doubted this when we first heard about it as well. Students can create their own scholarships? So in essence, the student creates her/his own opportunities for college scholarship money. It just sounded too good to be true, so we did a little investigating and this is what we found.

The first organization is called ScholarMatch.org. It started the same month as White Picket College in April 2010. Students (only in the San Francisco Bay area as of press time) can set up online profiles of themselves and provide their goal of raising money for school. Potential donors sign up for the site and are given student matches. Donors get to know the student via her/his profile and donate money toward the student’s education.

As we perused the site, we found that none of the students we saw had incredibly high goals such as $25,000. In fact, the highest scholarship goal we saw was $8000; however, we did not sign up for the site, thus we did not have full access to all the student profiles. So it seems ScholarMatch is for students who would like to fill a gap in their need, but do not have overwhelming need.

It is likely that ScholarMatch will expand to include other parts of the United States besides San Francisco, but who knows. We like the idea of creating scholarship opportunities for motivated students, and we like that it seems to be based on the student’s need, which is great for students from upper middle class (UMC) families. Therefore, we urge our readers in the San Fran area to take a look and please report back to us.

There are two other sites where students can also create scholarships called: Sponsormydegree.com and Greennote.com.

For more in depth commentary on how to create your own scholarship, please refer this college scholarship article by Kim Clark of U.S. News & World Report.